A short biography of Lin Jaldati, born as Rebekka Brilleslijper, the Dutch Jewish, Yiddish-singing, Holocaust survivor, who moved to East Berlin in 1952 and became the Yiddish diva of the Communist world.

Empowered by the Soviet state before World War II to create a Jewish national culture, Soviet Jewish activists were interested in building such a culture because they were striving for a national revolution--through the creation of a new culture in which Jews would be able to identify themselves as Jews on new, secular, Soviet terms. This book explores the ways in which Jews functioned as part of, not apart from, the Soviet system, as well as Jewish history.

A Special Edition of the Journal of Jewish Identities, vol. 7, no. 1 (January 2014)With introduction from David Shneer and Robert Adler-Peckerar along with 11 scholarly essays from Kronfeld's students

The Berkeley School of Jewish Literature demands that multilingualism and cosmopolitanism serve as the starting point for any intellectual engagement with literature and culture. This seems an obvious statement about Jewish literature and culture. And, yet, it turns out to be quite radical within the context of Jewish Studies. It is also a needed corrective to the study of all literatures and cultures.

If one thinks about how the academy divides up the study of literature and culture, one need only look at the names of departments to see how we approach our subjects. Universities have departments or programs of French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Chinese languages, literatures, and cultures. This taxonomy of knowledge has as its starting point a Romantic notion of culture defined by language, land, and ultimately nation. The study of Jewish literatures had to find its place in this taxonomy, often as programs that often have more to do with geopolitical considerations than with cultural history. Jewish literature was forced to fit within the monolingual boundaries of “Hebrew literature,” “Israeli literature,” or more radically (and less frequently) “Yiddish literature.” This projection of national/linguistic borders onto Jewish culture was part of the 20th-century project of “normalizing” Jews’ status and then elevating the study of them through the lens of the nation-state.

Informed by Chana’s approach, the articles in this volume argue that such taxonomies not only do damage to the ways we understand Jewish languages, literatures, and cultures, but they create false impressions of the people and culture under study. They conceal as much as they reveal. Perhaps this is the reason nearly everyone in this volume was trained in “comparative literature,” a unique, interdisciplinary and interlingual department, the Berkeley school might argue, where one can properly be trained in the study of languages, literatures, and cultures. If “Jewish” is to be an adjective describing languages, literatures, and cultures it by definition cannot be bound by any single language, place, or singular identity. It is precisely the cosmopolitanism and multilingualism of Jews that demands a cosmopolitan and multilingual approach to their literary and cultural production. Even our contributors who focus on work only in Hebrew never actually only work in Hebrew. They look at the traces of Jewish multilingualism in or beneath that language.

This fundamental rethinking of the taxonomy of knowledge, extending beyond the nation-state, resonates far outside the languages of a particular, perhaps demographically-small group’s literature. We are led to question all of the ways we categorize and restrict literature and culture. Like all good scholars of Jewish literature, scholars of every “national literature” or any culture in a particular linguistic sphere need to question the systems that classify and perhaps limit them. A survey of French literature would never be confined to the cartographic borders of the contemporary Republic of France, but can it (should it) include Maghrebi Arabic literature published in Paris? How about poetry using French metrical systems written in the suburbs of Algiers in Kabyle Berber—a language with nearly the same number of speakers as Modern Israeli Hebrew? The Berkeley school demands a broad, profoundly historicized approach to the study of literature and culture while always maintaining a keen eye on the object under scrutiny.

Peretz Markish (1895-1952), one of Eastern Europe's most important Yiddish poets in the period between the two world wars, was a fiercely independent maverick who published work in all literary genres. Although emerging from the Kiev literary tradition, Markish always went his own way in a literary career spanning four decades and embracing almost all twentieth-century aesthetic movements. After the Revolution, he settled in Poland, but returned to be integrated more closely into Soviet culture than any other Yiddish writer of his generation, receiving the Order of Lenin. It did not save him from Stalin's show-trials of Jewish intellectuals, and he was executed in 1952, but as early as 1955 his writing was being rehabilitated in the Soviet press: a testament to his literary stature. His Yiddish works were widely translated into Russian and Ukrainian, establishing him as a major Russian writer of his times. This new volume serves both as a companion to the life and works of Peretz Markish and as a source-book for future research. A biography and bibliography are combined with some twenty contributed essays by Peretz scholars, surveying the entire corpus of his work and all periods of his career.

In the Jewish tradition, reading of the Torah follows a calendar cycle, with a specific portion assigned each week. Following on this ancient tradition,Torah Queeries brings together some of the world’s leading rabbis, scholars, and writers to interpret the Torah through a “bent lens.” This incredibly rich collection unites the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight-allied writers, including some of the most central figures in contemporary American Judaism. All bring to the table unique methods of reading and interpreting that allow the Torah to speak to modern concerns of sexuality, identity, gender, and LGBT life. Torah Queeries offers cultural critique, social commentary, and a vision of community transformation, all done through biblical interpretation. Written to engage readers, draw them in, and at times provoke them, Torah Queeries charts a future of inclusion and social justice deeply rooted in the Jewish textual tradition.

A labor of intellectual rigor, social justice, and personal passions, Torah Queeries is an exciting and important contribution to the project of democratizing Jewish communities, and an essential guide to understanding the intersection of queerness and Jewishness.

Contrasting queer life today and in years past, this landmark book brings together autobiographies, poetry, film studies, maps, documents, laws, and other texts to explore the meaning and practice of the word queer. By this Shneer and Aviv mean: queer as both a form of social violence and a call to political activism; queer as played by Robin Williams and Sharon Stone and as lived by Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena; queer in the courthouses of Washington D.C. and on the streets of hometown America. Contextualizing these contemporary stories with ones from the past, and understanding them through the analytic tools of feminist social criticism and history, the authors show what it means to be queer in America.

Queer Jews describes how queer Jews are changing Jewish American culture, creating communities and making room for themselves, as openly, unapologetically queer and Jewish. Combining political analysis and personal memoir, these essays explore the various ways queer Jews are creating new forms of Jewish communities and institutions, and demanding that Jewish communities become more inclusive.